Posts Tagged ‘fun’

After weeks of hard work, we present to you the new and shinier version of Epistory with Mod & Profiles (multiple saves) support and more... You spoke and we listened. We understand it would have been better for most of you to receive the update in chunks over the weeks but given the amount of changes it was a lot easier for us to handle one big transition to the new version instead of several small incremental versions. We even had to stop planning for a workshop beta. Without further ado, here’s the changelist.

This article shows the difficulty of maintaining Art Direction consistency on a project when its scope and visual quality suddenly increase during production!

First, we’ll explain the assets creation guidelines we decided at the beginning of the project. Then we’ll see how quality problems emerged as the production budget increased, and how we dealt with them!

Art constraints for small budget

When we started the production of Epistory (codenamed “The heroine of no tale” in those ancient times), the sales expectations were quite low because we thought we were targeting the niche of typing games. We already wanted a unique art direction, made of unfolding environments and paper-crafted items, but the budget constraints made us humble concerning the visual quality of each asset. So we ended up with those production guidelines to create game assets :

Simple geometry

All assets using the same multi-usage shader

No complicated texture mapping (basic planar UVs)

No unique texture per asset, only generic colored patches gathered in a few textures

Despite our small budget, all those assets put together created a simple but pretty cool look :

Those constraints made us 3D artists sad but it should have allowed us to make all assets and environments in time for the game release, so we were quite happy with it! But that was before we started communicating on the game…

Change of scope

The art team was producing the first levels of the game, and we started to spread some images and videos, building the community. At that point we understood that something was happening, youtubers were talking about our game, forums and conventions gave us very positive feedbacks. Our little typing game was becoming pretty popular, people were really loving it! The first round of Early Access conforted the first impression. As thousands of people added “Epistory: Typing Chronicles” into their steam wishlist, we realized that instead of making a funny but small scoped typing game, we could scale things up. We decided to transform it into a unique story driven adventure game, with lots of dungeons, collectibles, a scenario written by a real professional writer, and even give a voice to the narrator.

As the deadlines were pushed to 2016, the art team jumped at the chance to put more visual quality into the game!

New quality standards

We wanted to make the most of this extra production time, and we put more details into the new assets, so we basically took the opposite of what we were doing until now:

More interesting paper-like shapes for the geometry

More and more complicated shaders

Clean unfolded texture mapping coordinates

Unique textures per asset (or one texture for the same group of assets)

A subtle but efficient vertical gradient (the base of the asset is darker than its top)

With unique texture coordinates, we could paint paper folds, and add details like hand painted highlights on the edges and Ambient Occlusion (darker color at the junction between surfaces)

On those two images it’s easy to spot the quality gap. You can notice the polished shapes and the greater work made into the textures, which add a lot of depth and details to the assets :

The production time was obviously far longer than the old technique, because for EACH game asset, we had to unfold clean texture coordinates, calculate the Ambient Occlusion pass, calculate the vertical gradient, paint the edges highlights and details into the texture,…

We also put extra time to the environments creation process by adding an “artist layout pass” to polish each dungeon, and by working more on the lighting setups and effects. And the overall visual impact was far better than before!

The problem was that we quickly found out that the “old” assets looked dull compared to the new ones, but we couldn’t afford redesigning all of them…

Assets wars

With each new asset being prettier than the last, we soon spotted a problem in the consistency of the art direction and assets quality !

There was too much difference between the old “flat” assets and the new “detailed” ones :

Unfortunately the budget was not so big that we could afford redoing all the former game assets to match the final style!

That unexpected constraint gave us the idea of showing a progression in the art style through the game, and we implemented a chronological progression into the overall papercraft quality of the adventure. That is to say the first part of the game is made of more basic shapes, and the quality of the papercraft technique evolves to be more and more noticeable as we progress into the game, following the steps of humanity evolution:

1- At the beginning, as the world unfolds for the first time, you will see the “basic” objects in the “nature” theme

2- Next, in the first dungeon you will be able to spot some prehistoric assets, made of archaic papercraft assets

3- As you continue your journey through human evolution, papercraft techniques evolves to show ancient civilizations

4- Later, you will travel through complex origami buildings, and much more, but we won’t spoil you the pleasure of discovering it in the game!

We managed to add a real meaning to this papercraft evolution, but still we decided to redesign several old assets to match the quality gap. We’ve done this only for the assets we could see all over the adventure. Moreover, by doing those important assets prettier, they would be easily noticeable at the beginning of the game, where the assets are simpler, and better integrated in later dungeons, where the assets are polished.

The combat, exploration and teleporter tiles redone from scratch:

The conclusion of this article could be that it’s far better to know the scope/budget BEFORE beginning the production process! If the scope suddenly increases, you will have to choose between more content or more quality, but keep in mind that most of the time you will not be able to use a trick like we did, and you will end up redoing all of your assets from scratch! And as artists will always tend to increase quality if you give them extra time, do not forget to keep an eye on them!

Update: We didn’t make it but we’d like to thanks all the people who voted for Epistory. Next year you’ll do it!

Hi Folks,

It’s the 6th Annual Indie of the Year Awards, a celebration of this year finest indie games chosen by indies fans. If you could give us a hand and vote for Epistory on IndieDB it would be great. The top 100 will be announced on the 11th of December. Let’s do our best!

Epistory needs to establish a subtle, layered narrative voice within its opening moments. Join the game’s writer in a deep exploration of why this story is harder to begin than most.

Wether you’re writing a game, or a movie, or a novel: it’s always difficult to start a story. There’s just so much riding on those opening moments. This difficulty is basically the premise for Epistory’s plot, in which a struggling writer is trying to start a novel. The player assumes the role of the muse, helping the story come to life.

Epistory adds an additional complication: as well as attracting the player’s interest immediately, it must also establish the narrative voice. In this article, I’ll be explaining more about what this means and how I’ve tried to solve the problem.

What’s In A Voice?By ‘narrative voice’, I simply mean the voice of the narrator: who is telling the story? Why? And in what context? Are they speaking to the audience directly? Are they writing a letter? Is the audience an active party in the story, or are it given a camera’s eye view into someone else’s world? Ultimately, narrative voice defines the relationship between the storyteller and the audience.

Most narrative voice is established by its medium and a few quickly-gleaned implications. When a written story starts with a line like “Call me Ishmael” (a laMoby Dick), we instantly understand that there is a person telling the story to the reader. We understand that the narrator has their old world view, and agenda, and feelings. But when we watch a film and a camera sweeps across the Earth – like no human can do – we understand that a picture of the world is being presented to us impartially. We are invited to watch through a window.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway?In Epistory, the narrative voice comes from a writer who we never see. All the words of narration – from the introductory sequence to the writing stretched over the levels – are the words this writer has written in their novel. The player’s goal is to help the writer create the story: typing words and discovering things to encourage the author’s inspiration.This is a very hard thing to explain in-game: not least because we don’t meet the writer. We have to inferher presence. Originally, the game’s script did this the obvious way: it begins with a writer saying “I hate writer’s block! How am I ever going to write this story?”, and quickly settles down into the story itself, “She looked like a lost little girl”. This establishes the narration as the writer’s voice and ensures it makes sense within the context of the game.This works – but it’s messy because it creates two distinct narrative voices. The author’s (“I hate writer’s block!”) and the story’s (“She looked like a lost little girl”). Because we don’t really know which is which, we have to infer every time – and so there’s a constant dissonance. It’s hard to know who is telling the story. Also, writers tend not to ask themselves questions in their own prose, so the voice may not sound authentic to player.

A New VoiceI wanted to try and do something a bit more subtle and seamless: using a single voice that represents all the narration. I’ve tried to do this by presenting the story as a work-in-progress and showing the writer’s edits. The theory runs like this:The game begins on a black, foggy screen. A blank canvas. Then some text appears: “Once upon a time”. This is how all fairy stories start, right? The player knows that a story is beginning. But the text is quickly erased character-by-character. The story has changed, the writer’s hand is revealed by implication.The writer tries again, and this time she writes: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. This is how Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities - the best-selling novel of all time – begins. Even if the player doesn’t follow the reference (and most won’t!), they should understand that the story has been restarted.But this beginning is rejected too, and so it is also erased. The pattern has been established now: the author doesn’t know how to start the story. So, third time lucky, the narrative begins in earnest: “There was a girl. And she rode on the back of a great fox.”. And hey presto – the fog clears to reveal the player-character.

Voice of ReasonBecause there is only one narrative voice, the player can trust that it represents the words of a story being written around their actions. We build on this start by adding more interactions which make the player aware of the author – and vice versa – by changing text as the player interacts with the world. It’s a subtle idea, and maybe not everyone will get it. I expect most people won’t be able to articulate it. But subconsciously, I believe people will understand that a story is being written around them by an unseen author.

Successful execution relies on two things: using recognisable (or cliched) opening lines, so that the player understands what the writer is trying to achieve (ie, the beginning of a story); and a character deletion effect, so that the player is aware that the writer is deliberately erasing and rewriting text. Sound effects can help reinforce the idea of writing and erasing, too.

This, however, is not the whole story. While we work hard to establish and contextualise the narrator’s voice early in the game – we later sow in a few seeds of dissonance. Because in Epistory, not all is what it seems…

For the next few days we will focuson ironing out the bugs and quirks that were reported. Most notably any save bug that you or we encounter. The game is currently playable in several settings but the save is sometimes a bit dodgy so that is our top priority.

Then, in the coming weeks, we will continue to produce the next chapter of the game. We should be able to deliver it in a month. A month and a half, maximum.

We will of course do minor content release in between chapters with stuff like improved UI and feedback, bug fixes & general polish. We want to avoid players going through a new chapter while it’s only half done because it will ruin part of the joy of discovery.

We are also going to create an unstable branch for the game so you can try our latest advancements before we make it available for everyone. We may also add a separate branch for people wanting to try the new areas before they are finished if you ask for it.

Hi folks! We are so glad to announce the release of Epistory on Early Access. See you the 30thofSeptember on Steam. Meanwhile, you can visit the Steam page of Epistory and put it in your wish list: http://store.steampowered.com/app/398850

Introduction

Most games can be reduced to a series of actions and reactions. Today I would like to share with you a way to facilitate iteration and expansion of these interactions. It will sound obvious to a lot of people but I would have loved to see this kind of example 6 months ago. When I was not yet used to component based mechanics.

It all started with a simple request a few months ago, we had just designed & implemented the scoring system and we needed items in the game world to be able to give points when activated. Easy, I wrote a small script which would be attached to objects that had to add points when activated. Controlled by our item’s base class, it would be called automatically.

The buildup

As time went on, that simple “points giver” script was updated to include various behaviors like prefab spawning, door unlocking and so on. It worked well but it was not very flexible. So I changed the structure to include a parent class to have a common entry point and place each behavior in a child class.

It’s not standard notation but you can see the rewards and the items have a base class, and only these base classes interact with each other. The same kind of effect could be achieved with interfaces but I prefer to have a default implementation.

The true power of this structure lies in the modularity. Every trigger or actionable item in the game works with any reward and you can place any number of reward in a game object. The most basic action/reaction you can do is simply “collider – trigger – reward”. The player walks in the scene and something happens (tutorial message, cinematic, …).The possibilities are exponential and a new reward behavior is very easy to add.

Polish & additional features

Over time, features were added. Like the possibility to set a delay between the action and the reward. Camera travelling firing rewards at event points… What started as a joke -“reward” as in skinner boxes- is becoming a running gag: we’ll call this one “reward_kill_player”.

I recently did the same kind of structure for visual effects. A few key points (creation, destruction, hit, …) are exposed via a base class. You just have to derive from it and you get all the hooks that an artist would need to handle animations or particle effects.

Conclusion

The system is currently powerful enough to allow our designer to create our whole in-game introduction & tutorial with only the reward system. Looking back my only regret is that this system was not put in place earlier to have more of the game relying on it. Also, calling it “reward” when it’s in fact a “reaction” was a bit shortsighted.

I can share some sample code if some of you are interested. I leave you with one of the more complex interaction that we can produce.

P.S.: As a very tangible reward after a long wait between news here’s a few free gifs. Both features were added this week:

- One of the first iteration. Nothing special…

- One of the last iteration. Circular pattern, grows from the middle and not all of them at once.